Motorsport Links
Planet F1 is my favourite F1 website. Their editorials are perceptive and entertaining, and usually fairly accurate. Highlights are the race previews and reviews.
used to be a pay only site, but has now opened up its news pages to the public. It is an excellent source of F1 and MotoGP news, and also reports on other series. The subscription service (~$50/year) includes a weekly online magazine which has gone sharply downhill since the departure of Nigel Roebuck in January 08.
ITV's F1 website is an endangered species now that the BBC is taking over UK F1 broadcasting from 2009, but the features from Martin Brundle, Mark Hughes, and David Coulthard are always worth a read.
F1.com is the official F1 website and its main attraction is live timing for all sessions during a race weekend. The technical articles about F1 cars are definately worth reading too.
Racing Underground has a huge catalog of motorsports videos for download via BitTorrent. This website has let me watch all the series that aren't screened in the US: Aussie V8s, WRC, A1GP, BTCC, plus a lot of F1 videos. You need to register for an account (which is free) and set up a bit torrent client (like utorrent) but it is pretty easy. You might need a bit of bandwidth too, most of the vids are >600Mb.
Sim-racing Links
I spend a lot of time at nogripracing.com, which is a relaxed and friendly sim-racing community. My user name is hardjack79 (it is a partial contraction of my first and last names, if you were wondering, and I'm kind of stuck with it now). The forums at nogrip are generally free of dickheads and the downloads sections for GTR2 and GTL are very well populated.
I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I hadn't stumbled across BATracer. It is a "Free Racing Manager Game" where you compete in a season of one of a dozen motorsport series against other people from all over the world. You usually have a team-mate (a friend or a soon-to-be-friend) and you adjust parameters for strategy, setup, and driving style to determine how your driver will attack the next qualifying or race session. Then once a day BATracer calculates the session and the next time you log on you can check out how you did and prepare for the next session. It has entertained me for almost 3 years now and I've put many dozens (I hope its not more) of hours into trying to estimate the game parameters out of race and practice data -- it is pure crack for a data analysis junkie. And its completely free. Unbelieveable.
I have been beta-testing a racing wheel by Fanatec since March, and I'll eventually publish a review and some tips for it. It is a beautiful wheel, and I've been having a lot of fun playing GT Legends, GTR 2, and Richard Burns Rally with it. Fanatec have been working hard to make the wheel even better and the final product is shipping as I write this (May 2008). The wheel is called the Porsche 911 Turbo Wheel, and features exceptional belt-driven force feedback, 900 degrees of rotation, clutch pedal, a 6+1 shifter and a sequencial shifter, and wireless connection with the PC.
Computer Links and Utilities
ATI Tray Tools by Ray Adams is an awesome free application for ATI Radeon video cards. It can overclock, tweak, and monitor the hardware, and is a very easy interface for changing the driver settings and can load special graphics profiles when you start different games. Hidden away in the profiles menu is an option for enabling tripple buffering, which has let me play my games with Vertical Sync enabled without worrying about dropouts when the fps drop below the refresh rate. This is one of the best downloadable applications I've ever come across. It is also bundled with every Omega driver (which I find give me a few extra, badly needed, fps).
VLC Media Player is great for all the right reasons. It is incredibly small, free, community developed, feature rich, runs on almost all platforms/OS's, has no advertising, is safe, and most importantly it runs almost any media format/codec you can throw at it: streaming media, audio, video, subtitles,... I've even pointed it towards an .iso file and it played that without a blink. The stock interface is very simple, but even that can be skinned.
is another amazing small (215kb!), well coded, and well documented application. Utorrent is a free bit-torrent client with all the necessary features and I have put it to good use since discovering Racing-Underground.com in 2007. There is a beta available (balloons out to 260kb) which adds a web-interface so that you can control your torrents from afar.